After Paris, will Obama actually do anything to halt terror attacks?
Appearing at the G-20 summit in Turkey, President Obama made appropriate noises about responding to ISIS in the wake of the violent attack in Paris on November 13, just two weeks after ISIS shot down a Russian passenger aircraft over the Sinai Desert, killing all aboard.
Obama murmured about an “attack on the civilized world” and spoke poetically about “skies [that] have been darkened.” He promised to stand with France in addressing the savage attack. To date, that promise meant that the U.S. shared with France data about ISIS strongholds in Syria.
Yesterday, using this data, France obliterated ISIS’s Raqqa command center, recruiting center, and ammunition storage. Interestingly, despite the U.S. having possession of this information, and indeed, using it for an expensive surgical strike against “Jihadi John,” our military made no effort to take out these same targets.
Obama also promised to stand with Turkey and Europe generally to stop the overwhelming flow of migrants. Nevertheless, speaking through Ben Rhodes, the English and Poly Sci major turned Obama foreign policy adviser, Obama (in common with the three Democrat candidates for president) has promised to continue unabated the flow of Middle Eastern refugees into the United States. To assuage people’s fears, however, the administration did promise that these refugees would be subject to “rigorous” vetting.
That promised vetting is an interesting subject. We had occasion recently to deal with a vetting process when we sent a family member off for an extended stay in another country. The process took months, required us to have both our local police and the FBI verify that our relative is a law-abiding person, and mandated that our relative’s fingerprints go into the system. Our relative also needed a current U.S. passport, which is itself subject to all sorts of vetting.
None of that kind of vetting, of course, can be used to determine the bona fides of the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees Obama promises to bring to the United States. Neither war-torn Syria, nor all of the chaotic, often anarchic adjacent regions from which the refugees come, has any useful infrastructure to ensure a refugee’s good character. There are no police agencies, no fingerprints, no family or organizations vouching for their good character, and no passports (or, if there is a passport, it’s entirely possible that it’s a forgery).
The fact that large parts of the Middle East are broken, whether because of war, poverty, or the grinding effects of a medieval ideology, means that the “rigorous” security that Obama promises as a predicate to inviting alleged Syrian refugees into America amounts to nothing more than asking the person “Are you a terrorist?” And if the person answers “no,” that person will get a handshake, a check, and a bus ticket to an American town or city.
It is true that not all of these refugees will be terrorists. Many of them – perhaps even the majority — are really people who are on the run from the barbaric violence in their homeland (although, sadly, they’ll be bringing with the same ideology that gave rise to this barbarism). However, if Europe is anything to go by, there is a substantial chance that hundreds or thousands of terrorists will enter the U.S., especially if we have the same refugee pattern Europe has witnessed; namely, that 70% of the “refugees” are military aged males.
Obama also remains committed to sending American dollars to Saudi Arabia, which has funded and aggressively promoted the particularly virulent Wahhabi Salafist Islam that gave rise to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other radical Islamic organizations. If Obama genuinely wanted to destroy radical Islam, he would have approved the Keystone Pipeline. Doing so would not only have meant more jobs and cheaper fuel for Americans, it would also have stopped the endless flow of American money being sent to Saudi Arabia in exchange for Saudi Oil.
In other words, while Obama makes little cheeping noises about destroying the terrorists before they try to destroy us, his administration is doing everything it can to fund Islamism and then bring those Islamists to America.
